WASHINGTON — As a 15-year-old in the summer of 1998, Monique Currie attended plenty of Washington Mystics games during their inaugural season. She’d take the bus with her sister, her cousins or her friends down to the MCI Center, now known as Capital One Arena, and they’d sneak in a back entrance.
At least once, Currie ended up in the team’s media room, “just lurking around until somebody put me out,” she said on Monday.
When the games ended, Currie and her peers would stake out a spot outside the parking garage where the players exited, hoping one of them would wave as they drove away. They hit the jackpot one night when Nikki McCray, a future three-time WNBA All-Star, stopped at a red light just past the garage. McCray (later known as McCray-Penson) reached in her backseat, grabbed a pair of sneakers, signed them, and gave them to Currie and her friends.
“We probably fought over who got to take the shoe home,” Currie said. “… But it was really, really special to me to be standing outside.”
On Monday, Currie was standing inside CareFirst Arena, where the Mystics moved in 2019. This time, she didn’t have to sneak in the back. She was the one people were hoping to catch a glimpse of.
Currie told those stories about how the Mystics had impacted her as a teenager during her induction ceremony into the Mystics Hall of Fame — which came at halftime of the team’s 62-49 loss to the Golden State Valkyries — and in a pregame media availability.
The honor was the ultimate full-circle moment for Currie, a Washington native who’d seen the franchise from the very beginning.
“Any Hall of Fame is very, very special,” she told reporters, “but being inducted into the Hall of Fame in your hometown to a team that you grew up watching … I can’t really describe how big of a deal it is to me and how special it is.”
“I don’t know another D.C. native who’s more proud to be from Washington, D.C., than Monique Currie,” Marissa Coleman, who went to high school in the area and was Currie’s Mystics teammate for three seasons, said during the induction ceremony.
Initially, Currie’s full-circle moment had been getting to play for the Mystics at all. The 6’ forward played collegiately at Duke and was drafted third overall to the Charlotte Sting in 2006. After the Sting folded in January 2007, the Chicago Sky took her in the dispersal draft, then traded her to the Mystics in May 2007.
As she got acclimated, she couldn’t believe where fate had taken her. “I can’t believe I really play for the Mystics now. I live up the street!” she thought to herself as she drove to the arena. And she parked in the same garage where she’d waited to see the players after games, while her mom wondered why she wasn’t home yet.
In nine seasons in Washington, Currie averaged 10.5 points, 4.2 rebounds, 1.7 assists and 1.0 steals in 23.8 minutes per game. She is the Mystics’ all-time leader in games played with 285, including the regular season and playoffs. She also ranks in the top three in franchise history in minutes played, points, rebounds and steals.
She spent eight straight seasons in Washington from 2007 to 2014, playing for five coaches in her first five seasons and six total. She endured consecutive 6-28 and 5-29 seasons but also went to the playoffs four times.
“The record sometimes wasn’t so great, but it was always a good time,” Currie said.
Arguably her best individual season came in 2010, when she averaged a career-high 14.1 points and 4.8 rebounds per game while shooting a career-best 44.6% from 3-point range. That year, she tied for second in the voting for WNBA Most Improved Player.
Currie moved around the league from 2015 to 2017 but returned home for her final WNBA season in 2018, helping the Mystics to their first-ever WNBA Finals appearance. In 2015 and 2017, she played for the Phoenix Mercury, where she teamed up with 2013 No. 1 overall pick Brittney Griner.
“I hated playing against her, hated playing against her,” Griner, now with the Connecticut Sun, told The IX Basketball on Thursday. “Oh my god, I hated playing against her. And then when we got on the same team, I was just like, ‘OK, all the reasons I hate, I love now.’”
Griner said Currie was the kind of teammate who made everyone better — and the type of opponent who was seemingly everywhere. “She always ended up finding a way to bump me when I was rolling to the paint in a pick-and-roll,” Griner said. Currie was also the type of teammate who was always locked in, and Griner recalled how guard Diana Taurasi would tease Currie for twisting her hair when she was focusing especially intently.
Atlanta Dream assistant coach LaToya Sanders, who played with Currie in Washington in 2018, shared similar thoughts about Currie’s impact, even as Currie went from a full-time starter in 2016 to mostly a reserve in her final two seasons.
“Ironically, me and her, as a Tar Heel [alum] and a Blue Devil, we actually had really good chemistry,” Sanders told The IX Basketball on Thursday. “… It wasn’t an easy situation because we changed a lot of starters and all of that midway through the season. But she was just the ultimate professional, encouraging, lifting up the young ones, mentoring [and] teaching, on top of, whenever she got into the game, she still got buckets. So yeah, she was great to be around.”
The Mystics built on their 2018 Finals run by winning a championship in 2019. Currie was there for the clinching game at home and felt like she’d been part of it. She even got several congratulations that night from people who didn’t realize she’d retired. In that moment, she’d truly seen it all, from the Mystics’ worst-ever season as an expansion team in 1998 to their best in 2019.
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On Monday, the updated Hall of Fame banner with Currie’s name on it was unveiled in the rafters, right next to the 2019 championship banner. She is just the sixth inductee in the franchise’s Hall of Fame, joining Vicky Bullett, Chamique Holdsclaw and Murriel Page in 2022; McCray-Penson in 2023; and Alana Beard in 2024. Currie saw Page play on the 1998 team, and she played with Beard both at Duke and in Washington.
“I love the fact that our organization is very intentional about our great, great players — all of our players, frankly,” Mystics head coach Sydney Johnson told reporters on Sunday. “… We don’t have anything if we don’t have our current players, our past players, certainly the future players. This is what the league is built on, so to celebrate our womanhood and how good those players have been, that’s how we gotta roll.”
Currie came to the Mystics’ shootaround on Monday and met the current team, which both Johnson and the players thought was important.
“I think it’s gonna be just huge for us young players that maybe we didn’t really get to watch [past Mystics] play, but [we can] see the city and the franchise recognize all that they were doing,” second-year forward Kiki Iriafen told reporters on Sunday. “And without them, we wouldn’t be here today and be able to play and reap all these benefits and rewards of the league. So I’m just excited to meet them.”
“It’s just always respect to the game and the people who’ve worked hard before us,” fifth-year center Shakira Austin told The IX Basketball on Thursday. “And having that [Hall of Fame] celebration is just another goal that we can all try to achieve. And I think it just shows what the organization has [done] in the past and where we’re trying to go.”
As tipoff approached, the fans streamed in, picking up Currie bobbleheads as they entered. A fan in a white Currie jersey was one of the first arrivals, getting to her seat nearly an hour before tipoff. Another fan sitting courtside brought a sign that read, “1 MO DC Legend!” with Currie’s No. 25 on it.
Some of Currie’s former teammates made the trip, too, including Coleman, Beard, Crystal Langhorne and Andrea Gardner-Williams. The first three were featured in a tribute video that played in a timeout before halftime, after which the crowd gave Currie a standing ovation.
(Since her retirement, Currie has remained in basketball by working as an official, something she’d long wanted to do. So it’s safe to say that that ovation was the loudest welcome any official has ever gotten at CareFirst Arena.)
During the halftime ceremony, Coleman took the microphone first. She made Currie laugh by describing her as “one of the realest people I know — sometimes too real.”
Coleman added, “You’ve always represented this city with pride, and today is just another piece in your legacy as a D.C. basketball legend.”
Then Currie received a white commemorative jacket from John Thompson III, the senior vice president of Monumental Basketball, which owns the Mystics. Last winter, Thompson had gotten to tell Currie she’d made the Hall of Fame during a Wizards game in Portland, Ore., where she lives now.
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When Currie took the microphone, she announced that the Mystics had asked her to give a speech, but she wanted to tell a story instead. So she launched into the tale about getting McCray’s shoes, and the fans erupted when they heard the name of the late Mystics star.
After Currie took the crowd through her early days as a Mystic, driving down North Capitol Street in disbelief, and to the present day, it was time for her and her family to count down to the reveal of the updated Hall of Fame banner.
“That’s really cool that the Mystics have honored her in that way,” sixth-year forward Michaela Onyenwere told The IX Basketball on Monday. “She’s done so much for this organization [and] so much for women’s basketball in her era as well.”
The halftime ceremony took about 11 minutes and concluded right as the players emerged to warm up for the second half. As Currie walked off the court, she and Onyenwere talked briefly. At shootaround, Currie had been “hyping me up a little bit,” Onyenwere said, so Onyenwere made a point to tell her after her induction, “Congratulations for an amazing career.”
Currie returned to her courtside seat for the second half to watch the newest generation of Mystics compete. Though she lives across the country now, she plans to stay connected to the franchise that has shaped so much of her life.
“She told us that she’ll be around,” Onyenwere said. “So it’s just really, really cool to be able to have somebody like that in our pocket.”
Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the group that owns the Washington Mystics, holds a minority stake in The IX Basketball. The IX Basketball’s editorial operations are entirely independent of Monumental and all other business partners.
The IX Basketball’s Natalie Heavren contributed reporting for this story.
